Travelling alone, without travelling by yourself

Most escorted tours are built for couples and quietly tolerate everyone else. Rooms are priced in pairs, and travelling alone usually means paying a single supplement, a surcharge that can add anywhere from a quarter to the entire cost of a second person's share, simply for occupying a room by yourself. A handful of operators have built their whole business the other way round: every traveller books alone, every room is priced for one, and the surcharge disappears because there was never a couple's rate to be excluded from in the first place.

This is a different proposition from a normal tour that happens to accept solo bookings. On a mixed group, the solo traveller is usually the exception the itinerary has been designed around rather than for, seated at the edge of a table built for pairs, offered a room that is a double with the second bed removed rather than one built to be single. A trip designed from the ground up for people travelling alone starts from the opposite assumption, and it shows in small ways throughout, from the size of the rooms to the shape of the group itself.

The maths, and the company

Just You is the clearest example in the catalogue, and its trips work on a simple premise: everyone on the tour is travelling solo, which changes the social arithmetic of the holiday as much as the pricing. There is no awkwardness about being the only person eating alone, because nobody is, and no assumption that solo travellers want to be paired off with a stranger for the sake of a shared taxi. A trip through Morocco's imperial cities, from the tanneries of Fes over the Atlas to a kasbah on the edge of the Sahara, becomes a group of people who each chose to go alone, in a small group of people doing exactly the same thing.

Where it suits the destination

Some trips suit this format better than others, and Andalucia is a good example of why. A week through Granada, Cordoba and Seville, with the Alhambra, the Mezquita and the cathedral that swallowed a mosque along the way, is dense with things worth discussing over dinner: architecture that changed hands between Muslim and Christian rulers more than once, and a region whose history rewards being talked through rather than simply looked at. A solo-only group, without the social islands that couples tend to form, tends to talk more, not less.

The season it solves best

December deserves a particular mention. Christmas and New Year are, for a great many people travelling alone, either the best or the worst time to be on their own, and a short break built for solo travellers turns the awkward middle ground into something more deliberate. A trip to Vienna over the festive season, taking in the city's grand imperial architecture and a side trip to Melk, with its baroque abbey on a bluff above the Danube, gives solo travellers a specific, sociable reason to be away from home in December rather than an accidental one.

What to actually expect

It is worth being honest about the trade-offs. A solo-only trip still means sharing excursions, meal tables and a coach with people you did not choose, which suits some temperaments more than others; anyone who genuinely wants solitude should look elsewhere. The rooms are single by design rather than a grudging concession, which tends to mean smaller rather than simply a double with a discount attached, and it is worth checking exactly what is included before assuming it matches a couple's version of the same trip.

What it removes is the financial penalty for being unaccompanied and the low hum of feeling like the odd one out in a room full of couples. Age is not really the determining factor people assume it is, either: solo travel appeals as much to someone newly divorced or widowed as to someone who has simply never found travelling with a partner or a group of friends practical to arrange. For a great many people, that combination, of no surcharge and no sense of being the spare part, turns out to be most of what was putting them off travelling alone in the first place.